Charlie Kirk was a father of two children. He was also a kind of foster parent to thousands of Gen Z-ers orphaned by secularism. His death will weigh heavily on both.
One of the core beliefs in this here corner of the internet is that adoption is at the heart of ultimate reality. In a very real sense, we’re all orphans, longing for our forever home (see Psalm 84). The God of the Christian Bible knows a thing or two about adoption (see Romans 8). About caring for orphans (see Psalm 68 and James 1). About making families out of less-than-ideal circumstances (see Luke 2). And it was that giant of an Anglican, Jim Packer, who summed up the New Testament’s message as “adoption through propitiation.”
This big, ultimate story about a Father who stops at nothing to make us his children inevitably finds its way into our smaller stories; the Word who promised not to leave us orphans (John 14:18) shapes the words we tell ourselves about what it means to be human.
And this has been the focus of Side Notes: to sit on the banks of the confluence of adoption, poetry, and pop culture, sharing about my own family’s adventures in these waters and noting when the water of adoption spills over and into the stories we tell ourselves.
I think I’ve done a pretty solid job of adhering to the theme. Even when current events, especially of the political nature, have tempted me to spill some ink. But I’ver never written overly about politics or political things in this space. I’ve stayed in my lane and let lots of other people write very capably about regional, national, and international politics that so relentlessly capture our collective attention spans.
But politics won’t leave us alone. And if the theme of adoption and foster care overlaps with current events, I want to have the eyes to see and the follow-through to stay true to my mission, even if it gets “political.”
Which brings me to Charlie Kirk.
It’s been over two months since his assassination at a Turning Point USA event at Utah Valley University. I’m not here to add to the takes about what his death means or doesn’t mean for the future of America or conservatism or Christianity. (If you’re looking for thoughtful reflections on Kirk’s life, legacy, as well as some what-ifs, I’d point you to these pieces by David Bahnsen, Bethel McGrew (for World News Group and on her Substack, Albert Mohler, and Matthew Lee Anderson.)
(There’s also… Charlie Sheen?!?! You know the world is going crazy when Charlie Freaking Sheen is numbered among the voices of reason.)
Returning to these articles now feels a little bit like a time warp. Even though Kirk’s murder was only ~8 weeks ago. But that’s how fast time flies in the age of “social” media, unrelenting news cycles, and constant controversy.
(The current controversies swirling around Kirk and TPUSA center on utterly crackpot characters like Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes, and Candace Owens. And I adamantly refuse to go there. You’re welcome.)
For what it’s worth, I was not a regular follower of Kirk or TPUSA prior to his murder. Maybe I wasn’t quite in his Ideal Customer Profile. Maybe the algorithms, in their infinite wisdom, decided videos of his conversations with disaffected youth on college campuses wasn’t my thing? Either way, as I read about Kirk’s life and watched video after video of his dialogues with college students in the days after his death, the magnitude of his loss grew and grew. As Bahnsen noted, Kirk was a once-in-generation talent. His death was a loss for our country, for the conservative movement, for the idea of ideas, for the Socratic method, and for the defense of the Christian faith.
But the weight of his loss will be felt most in the lives of his two young children. And in the lives of the children he ministered to on college campuses.
Charlie’s orphaned kids, and a lifetime of father-sized hunger
In Sketch, the under-the-radar adventure / kids-horror film from Angel Studios that hit theaters last summer, the two child protagonists ask their father if they’re orphans. Their mother died sometime back, and they grapple with their identity throughout the film. In the course of one conversation, they land on the term “morphan” (mother + orphan) to describe their lot in life.
In the context of the film, it’s comical but heavy. In real life, it’s decidedly less humorous. But I thought of the child protagonists from Sketch as I was thinking about Charlie’s children. His daughter was 3-years-old and his son barely a year old when he was killed.
They are now, truly if not fully, orphans. To borrow the convention from Sketch, they are orphans from their father.
The loss of the biological father is a hunger-inducing event. This kind of hunger is hard to satiate. Even if their mother, Erika, remarries. Even if these children are surrounded by uncles or grandfathers or grandfather figures like Charlie’s mentor, Frank Turek. This father-sized loss will only be amplified by the fact that their father was a celebrity—and not just any kind of celebrity, but a political-religious leader of substance. A gigantic figure in this era of American history. Lord knows how his legacy will affect his children as they grow. I don’t pretend to know if Charlie’s vast digital footprint (to say nothing of the trajectory and ongoing work of TPUSA) will be a balm or source or grief or both as they come of age and grapple with the questions of identity and history in tandem with, quite possibly, their own public profile and fame. That feels like an unduly heavy burden.
What I do know is how lasting this father-hunger can be. I’ve seen it in my own dad and in my own son. My dad’s biological dad died from polio shortly before he was born, and my son’s biological father died from cancer a year after Lindsey and I adopted him. Both losses have profoundly affected the way they move through this world. I’ve written about my family histories and the haunting realities of lost fathers on a couple different occasions. You can read those here and here.
I’m not saying that what my family has experienced is exactly what Charlie’s kids will experience. Each story is unique. But when children lose their father before they really know him, before they’ve formed concrete memories of him, they will experience particular griefs and longings that require intense attention and prayer over many years.
Charlie’s foster kids
Then there are the children Charlie Kirk ministered to, primarily Gen Z college students on campuses across the country—and online.
But this wasn’t any ol’ ministry. Kirk was a worldview foster parent to thousands and thousands of children orphaned by secularism and social media (but I repeat myself). Abandoned by progressive ideologies that promised care and comfort amid the ruins of a post-Christian world, a large portion of an entire generation moves through the world like orphans:
- 47% of Gen Zers ages 12-26 often or always feel anxious, and 22% often or always feel depressed according to a 2023 Gallup survey
- Among Gen Z young adults ages 18-24, 44% reported persistent nervous or anxious feelings, and 33% reported persistent depressed or hopeless feelings in a fall 2022 Census Bureau survey
- One in five (20%) Gen Z youth ages 12-17 had a major depressive episode in the previous year, equivalent to 4.8 million adolescents
- Roughly 73% of 16- to 24-year-olds say they struggle with loneliness
- 58% of young adults reported experiencing little to no purpose or meaning in their lives in the previous month
- The rates of self-harm and suicide for U.S. teens skyrocketed around 2010
That’s bleak. Believe it or not, the mental health and behavioral health data on foster care youth (as well as youth who age out of the foster system) is even more bleak1.
And yet these stats don’t paint the full picture2. Gen Z isn’t struggling with a mere “loneliness epidemic”; men are choosing isolation so they can watch porn and gamble on sports all day. Gen Z (and Gen Alpha) aren’t simply struggling with “mental health”; they’ve been exposed to the social contagion of transgenderism, which is now showing signs of burning out like the virus that it was.
Most kids who enter into the foster system end up there because of neglect: their biological parent or parents can’t adequately provide for them or keep them safe.
Secular-progressivism promises care but defaults to neglect.
All of the students who lined up to debate Charlie Kirk have been neglected. And lied to about their neglect. Kirk tried to tell them the truth.
Kirk’s memorial service felt like something out of the Billy Graham era, a comparison I’ve come across a few times. It’s odd, though, given how very differently Kirk engaged his audience than Graham. Whereas Graham hosted spiritually hungry souls in a more-or-less united or homogenous United States, Kirk took on a more incarnational approach. He took on flesh and visited the existential orphanages that are modern college campuses, in an age of deep division, to hold conversations with those who loathed everything he stood for.
With dialogue, fatherly love, and honesty, Kirk “took in” kids traumatized by their own beliefs about reality. And as with most foster care situations, the children in his care were not too enthused about it. Some yelled, name-called, or acted out their unattended spiritual-emotional neglect. Kirk took most if it graciously and patiently, quick to find something to agree on before doing what he could to disprove the stories these children were telling themselves.
Who is going to draw them to the quad now?
A word about faith and politics
For certain American Christians, Kirk’s unabashed pairing of politics and faith came off as problematic, distasteful, syncretistic, or all of the above. The critique would go something like, “Spread the gospel, talk about how you want to be remembered for your faith in Jesus—but leave MAGA out of it.”
What Kirk knew is that in the vacuum of secularism, politics and political identity take on religious-sized importance. So, if you want to discuss the historicity of, say, Jesus’s resurrection—good luck with that when there’s a whole host of quasi-religious, deeply embedded, and inherently political presuppositions that affirm the idea that you are the center of the universe. All the convictions on things like abortion, gender identity, transgenderism, LGBTQ, racial justice, Palestine, etc., that progressives hold onto with such fervor have catechized them to shun formal religion. That would entail submitting yourself to Someone other than yourself.
There’s a growing body of data showing that the more liberal or progressive you are, the more irreligious you are. For the progressive left, politics is their religion.
Political ideology drives religious identity:
Furthermore, sociologists like Ryan Burge are finding that people don’t convert to Christianity and then become more conservative in their politics. It actually works the other way. As religiously unaffiliated people become more politically conservative, they become more open to faith.
Kirk knew this. And this is why, for him, his faith and politics couldn’t be separated. He was so confident in Christ, so sure of the metaphysical soundness of not just Christianity but of conservatism, that he emanated a paternal warmth and strength. His faith and his politics were fatherly. He was a father—real or otherwise—to so many.
And now he’s gone. My prayer is that the One and True “father of the fatherless” (Psalm 68) would fill that gap.
Lord, have mercy.
- 80% of children in foster care have mental health issues, compared to 20% of the general population. More than half of adolescents in the child welfare system have been diagnosed with at least one mental health disorder, compared with just one-fifth of adolescents in the general population. 41% of foster youth have a mental health diagnosis. The overall presence of behavioral health conditions was about three times higher for children and youth in foster care than for those who were not. 21.5% of the former foster youth population were diagnosed with PTSD, compared to only 4.5% of the general adult population. ↩︎
- Social psychologists like Jonathan Haidt have repeatedly noted that most mental health indicators were stable or improving until the early 2010s. Then, rates of anxiety, depression, self-harm, and suicide began rising sharply—and in some cases more than doubled between 2010-2015. This spike coincides with the tipping point of smart phone adoption and use. Go figure. ↩︎